The Second Doctor Service

Sirs — Having read with interest Dr. Pritchard’s recent report of the young woman with paroxysmal amnesia and transformation of personality, as well as Dr. Slayer’s study “On the So-called Cumberland Were-wolf,” I have spent the past months in deliberation over whether to share my own case with your readers. If I have hesitated, it is less out of concern for privacy than the simple fact that, though bearing the title of physician, I am but a country doctor, whose medical expertise extends little beyond those afflictions befalling the farmers and milkmaids of K — County. Indeed, I likely never would have opened your learned Journal were it not for the very strange events of the past year. Most of the members of your Society, I am aware, publish with that noble aim of advancing medicine; I write with the hope that one of them has encountered a case like my own, and so might save me before it is too late.

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Daniel Mason is the author of The Piano Tuner (Knopf, 2002) and A Far Country (Knopf, 2007). His most recent story for Harper’s Magazine, “The Miraculous Discovery of Psammetichus I,” was published in the March 2011 issue.